LEARN to Zoom (Don't if you can!)

I don't have enough palms to facepalm at this: LEARN has a paid Zoom subscription (https://learn.zoom.us/), so each member institution will get to use it for free. That means practically all university students and teachers. Local ISPs won't charge for data used through this subscription.

And now they are in the process of deploying a plugin that integrates this with Moodle.

Most interestingly, they have some wiki pages providing instructions on how to use Zoom for various purposes. See https://ws.learn.ac.lk/wiki/ZoomInstWorkshops/zoomguide/signin and https://ws.learn.ac.lk/wiki/ZoomInstWorkshops

Looking at the page histories, they've had this (including the paid subscription) going for at least 9 months. Now pushing hard to implement it everywhere.

One of their 'webinars' : Webinar on Zoom Video Conferencing for Research and Education

LEARN’s Support for the Challenges of COVID-19 : http://www.learn.ac.lk/covid-19

They could have used a similar plugin to integrate Jitsi meet with Moodle. And they could have provided a much better and robust solution with local installations of Jitsi meet. But they already had plans with Zoom. I believe they are going to introduce a similar setup through Schoolnet too.

I have been very naive to say the least, to expect that my friends and their departments will continue to enjoy the relative autonomy they used to have. Unfortunately, they are at the bottom, at the the end-user level of this decision making structure. Not many seem to have the courage to raise their voices in defense of their software freedom, privacy and security. Another sad thing that is likely to happen with an unexamined default like this is that it will be the natural choice for all sorts of other work; group calls among friends and family, community events etc, because it is already there in your phone or laptop.